ABSTRACT
Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights Brooklyn and Other Identities is a series of portraits of people enmeshed in the Crown Heights riots where Jews and blacks were so violently pitted against one another, in Brooklyn, August 1991. The riots were provoked when Gavin Cato, a black child, was hit and killed by a Lubavitch rebbe’s motorcade. By the end of that day Yankel Rosenbaum, a young Jewish scholar from Australia, was murdered in retaliation. The piece was first performed at the Public Theatre in the late spring and summer of 1992, with Christopher Ashley as director. Fires in the Mirror was then mediated for television broadcast by PBS’s “American Playhouse”, directed by George C.Wolfe. The TV adaptation first aired in April 1993.
